several people said that asking people to stay safe by wearing reflective clothing was akin to victim blaming and that the motorist is 100% responsible.

For the people who are actively trying to push a change in the way roads are built in the city and region, this is a perfectly reasonable stance to take.

For people who are trying to keep people safe given the deeply imperfect state of the world as it exists right now, such as yourself and the cops who don't know their own culpability in participating in the reproduction of the system as it currently exists, it's bonkers.

That's why I've been trying to work the, "Build transit in case you or someone you love is no longer able to drive!" line. Or, "Your world is awesome because people who were here before you were born were willing to pay taxes to make it great!" Not sure either of those have been having the intended effect.

Yes, but transit-oriented development would support a street where your drycleaner is within walking distance of your grocery store, and both would be within walking distance of your house. The parking requirements of cars would not produce an environment you would want to walk in. Transit can.

Many drivers think transit is heavily subsidized over the cost of the fare. Many drivers think the limitations of transit make it inherently unusable and unattractive compared to the so-called freedom associated with driving — thereby making transit a punishment to those who aren't 'successful' enough to afford a car or conformist enough to be driven by a desire to own one.

These assumptions lead to designing cities around the car, which further reinforce the assumptions.

The truth we almost never hear is that transit imposes much fewer costs on infrastructure, and people who don't drive cars pay into general revenue and often also shop at stores that include free parking (meaning transit users, pedestrians and cyclists actively pay into supporting an environment that is benignly annoying at best and actively hostile to them at worst). Between the money we put into the system and what we get back (plus the fact that we like to have roads for emergency services and goods movement, and that some unfortunate few of us pay for the system's status quo existence with our lives and health through impacts to air quality), the actual truth is that transit users are subsidizing drivers' lifestyle, not the other way around.

The fact that people are able to sell their cars in order to rely solely on those alternatives, and the very existence of these alternatives as viable options, is because we not only took the trouble to build them, but we put our foot down as much as possible and said we would build our cities to support the alternatives and broke ranks with most regions our size in North America. This is the story Gordon Price tells in this Modacity video.

This is much too complicated to explain to the voting hordes both inside and outside Metro Vancouver, however, so many misunderstand that spending on transit is actually cheaper in the long run for government, if you factor in health impacts, than continued investments in automobile dependency.

Pretty sure there are a ton of people that would think that no matter what the name of it is, because they believe transit riders are freeloaders or deserve 'punishment' because they think as drivers that they are being punished.

Talking to people who study this stuff, federal legislation is a big reason rental specific buildings are impossibly unprofitable for developers. We're not talking "take a little loss", we're talking significant orders of magnitude in the hole for rental vs. profiting by building condos for ownership.

Depends on the time of day. I only ever take the first bus down to Seattle (leaving here ~6am) and the last bus back to Vancouver (leaving Seattle ~7pm) back, both of which go quite easily and quickly. It's the same procedure for every bus:

everyone carries everything they are bringing into the immigration area

you do the interview while officers check out the bus with the driver

once the bus check is done, you can re-board the bus. when every one has finished getting through, you leave.

Ideal case I think it's taken not more than 45 minutes. In the middle of the day there may be another bus load of people, slowing things a bit, as the Canadian customs side has 3 booths and the American side has 4 but they don't always have people working all of them.

I don't recall my bus arriving much later than the scheduled time unless there is an accident on the I5.

I have seen folks once or twice not reboarding post-customs. Usually you just tell the driver ahead of time and they're cool with it.

Similarly, the Quick Coach bus service does a drop-off at the Campbell River Store. http://www.quickcoach.com/schedule/crs.htm Going from there to Whiterock (taxi, bus) will be much faster than almost all the methods that get you deeper into the Metro and will require you to backtrack.

Is it really the polling that drives the mayors' reasoning for not wanting to touch property tax? I think the argument that it's a poor way of funding investments in transportation system improvements makes a certain amount of sense. The usual argument is that property tax funds emergency services, water, and a lot of the community services like parks that help us cope with growth. With provincial downloading, there's more and more new stuff that 8 cents of every tax dollar is doing all the time.

But I think property taxes fail to capture that the costs individuals impose on the system vary widely — the wear and tear imposed on roads by cars and trucks far eclipses that imposed by people on walking, cycling and taking transit when you look at it on a per capita level. (It could be argued that sales tax doesn't either; I think it does very indirectly through the exemptions that make it ever-so-slightly less regressive.)

At the same time, transportation is a regional problem — I may pay property tax to the City of Vancouver, but I benefit enormously in my quality of life when people in Burnaby and Coquitlam don't drive in because the Evergreen and Millenium lines exist, and I'm sad that the people who live in Burnaby and Coquitlam don't seem to think that's true for them enough to continue to support transit, whether they do or don't leave their part of the region.

So maybe the opposition to the property tax is also rooted in skepticism of whether regional solutions can be funded by the mechanism that feels like so much localism and 'going it alone.' The mayor of West Van may think he can fund his own service based on what West Van pays into TransLink, but they unknowingly get some benefit from having a system that allows their domestic workers to bus in on an integrated fare system effectively from further/cheaper afield without having to arrive even more exhausted out of their minds. But that's perhaps too much of a stretch for him.

If you take down the license plate and the time of day and shoot them an e-mail, car2go can track down the last person to use it and look into suspending their privileges for failing to follow the rules. I can't guarantee they will but worth a shot? Especially since car2go typically bills members for impounding costs related to failure to follow the rules of their parking permits.